Highlights of “Going beyond jugaad”: A 3-day program on innovation management at IIMB

Like last year, Prof. Rishikesha T Krishnan, Prof. S Rajeev and I facilitated a 3-day workshop on innovation management at IIM Bangalore on Oct 15-17. It was titled: Going beyond jugaad: Building a systematic innovation capability. Participants came from Ahmedabad, Chennai, Gurgaon, Hyderabad, Lucknow, Mumbai, Pune, Thiruvananthapuram and of course, Bangalore. They represented IT (products & services), ITeS, Banking, Automotive and Construction service industries. Their designations varied from Technical Director, GM, DGM, Sr Staff Engineer, Senior Program Manager, Director etc.  It was nice to have PSU representation this time.

Following picture captures the framework we used in exploring various topics related to innovation management. It included: business strategy, its relationship to innovation strategy and specific “how to” practices relevant for improving idea pipeline, velocity and batting average.

We were fortunate to have two guest speakers. Mr. L R Natarajan, COO, New Business, Titan presented an overview of innovation journey at Titan over the past decade. Gopal Devanahalli,VP, Infosys presented strategy, roadmap and challenges of Products & Platforms division of Infosys. We also had a panel discussion on creative problem solving methodologies. Our panellists were Dr. Bala Ramadurai (co-Founder TRIZ Innovation India), Lakshman Pachineela Seshadri (Head, Innovation at SAP Global Delivery and visiting faculty at D-school, Potsdam, Germany) and Raghu Kolli, a Design Thinking expert.

Finally we had participants present status, learnings and actions they planned take back. Here is a summary of participant take-away.

Related articles:

Beyond jugaad: A summary of current practices and participant takeaways in managing innovation, Nov 6, 2011 (My blog on last year’s program highlights)

Can empathy be taught?

“Can empathy be taught?” This question came up when I and my friend Rahul Abhyankar were taking a stroll along Kaikondrahalli lake near our apartment. Rahul asked me, “What is one thing you wish were there as part of your engineering curriculum?” That got me thinking. I am fortunate to have gotten my undergraduate degree from one of the finest technology institutes in India (IIT Bombay).  However, I felt that the curriculum had little that will enable us to define which problems are worth solving. Now I know that empathy is the first step in that direction. Hence, the question, “Can empathy be taught?”

“Empathy” is tricky because it is not so much about a set of techniques that you can teach in the classroom. Or so it seems. Empathy is about understanding where “the other one is coming from”. It is a process of understanding some of the assumptions underlying other person’s context. Sometimes that can be drastically different from one’s own context. And then we end up defining the wrong problems to solve.

My favourite example of a transformation from lack-of-empathy to empathy is depicted in the 1988 Oscar award winning movie Rain Man. It starts by showing a young, ambitious, and selfish Charlie Babbitt (Tom Cruise) discovering that his estranged father has died and has left very little for him of his multi-million dollar property. Moreover, Charlie discovers that most of the property has gone to his brother Raymond (Dustin Hoffman), an autistic savant, whose existence Charlie was unaware of till then. Charlie pretty much “kidnaps” his brother from the mental institute in order to negotiate a deal to get his “fair” share of the property. As a result both brothers end up spending the next six days together on their way en route Los Angeles. At the end Charlie learns to care a little less about the money and care a lot more about his brother. It is a long way from where Charlie starts - calling Raymond “weird” or a “retard”.

Can a simple walk together as depicted in the movie poster generate empathy? MIT Sloan school has experimented with the concept of “empathy walk” in their leadership courses. Prof. Edgar Schein explains that “empathy walk” begins with following instructions to students – “As part of your homework next week you are going to pair up, preferably with someone you do not already know. Your first task will be to get acquainted with each other sufficiently to decide what kind of a person is most different from you concerning occupation, social structure, status, nationality, and so on. Once the two of you have figured that out, find such a person, and interview them about their world. Next week in class we will have each pair report on whom they picked, how they established contact and what they learnt from their get-together.”

How did an empathy-walk participant feel about it? The best source I found is a blog written by Allan, a student at MIT Sloan titled “My first empathy walk”.  In this Allan talks how he and his partner met with a 3x cancer survivor and what he understood by being empathetic. According to Allan, being empathetic is about finding a common ground among your differences. Will there always be a “common ground”? Ancient wisdom says that the answer is “yes”. Sometimes we refer to it as “humanity”. 

MIT is not the only place where empathy is taught. The other places where empathy is being “taught” are schools of Design Thinking in Stanford and Potsdam. Perhaps there are more.

Can we make “empathy walk” exercise a part of every school curriculum? I don’t know. What I know is that I plan to experiment with this concept in my workshops including the upcoming workshop on “Design Thinking”.

Edison syndrome and the pitfall of technology centric innovation approach

Technology creation has been a key driving force for many breakthrough innovations over the past several centuries, be it printing press, electric bulb or PC. However, the same passion that creates technology can also blind the innovator in seeing the real need of the customer he is trying to fulfil. Thomas Edison took the idea of phonograph from concept to cash. However, Edison’s adamant view that “every problem has a technology solution” led to the downfall of his phonograph business. We call this view – that every problem has a technology solution – Edison Syndrome. Let’s see how Edison Syndrome hurt Edison.

Thomas Edison invented phonograph in 1877. However, for the next few years, he decided to focus on commercializing electricity and the practical lamp. In the late 1890s, Edison went back to phonograph after making many improvements to his original invention. He founded National Phonograph Company and by 1904 sold over 113,000 talking machines and seven million records. This meant a market share of more than 60%. By the end of 1920s it came down to 2%. How did this happen?

Edison’s phonograph was rivalled by the Victor’s Talking Machine Company. Victor made technical improvements to the machine as well. However, Victor also focused on packaging – creating an enclosed horn in a handsome wooden cabinet. According to a historian “(Victor) was to make the phonograph for the first time a piece of furniture.” Banker’s panic in 1907 impacted both Edison and Victor. However, Victor’s recovered much faster.

The following quotes from Edison captures the essence of Edison’s approach: “We care nothing for the artists, singers or instrumentalists. All that we desire is that the voice shall be as perfect as possible.” And in another quote, “It is not our intention to feature artists or sell the records by using artists’ name,” Edison wrote, “we intend to rely entirely upon the tone and high quality of the voice.” In fact, Edison called promoting records by celebrity artists “fakery in music”. An Edison dealer asked in 1923, “Where do you expect to be in ten years without an artist of reputation?” And Victor did exactly that. As Edison’s biographer Andre Millard notes, “Many people bought Victor phonographs because they wanted to hear the famous singers who recorded on Victor records.”

What is the moral of the story? Technology creation and improvement is a great source of innovation. However, not every customer need requires a new technology for fulfilling it. Sometimes the differentiation lies in designing a superior customer experience, the way Victor did by creating famous artist labels. Steve Jobs certainly understood this well when he launched iPod a hundred years later.

Source:

DeGraaf, Leonard, “Confronting the mass market: Thomas Edison and the entertainment phonograph”, Business and Economic history, Fall 1995, pp 88-96.

Photo from wikipedia.org

Gandhi’s 3rd class railway travel during 1915 and 1917

“I have been in India for over two years and a half after my return from South Africa. Over one quarter of that time I have passed on Indian trains travelling 3^rd class by choice,” wrote Gandhi in his long letter to the editor of The Leader of Allahabad written from Ranchi on Sept 25, 1917. He travelled across the length and breadth of India - from Lahore to Madras and from Karachi to Calcutta. What was his 3^rd class travel experience like? Following excerpts from the book Mahatma Gandhi and the railways by Dr. Y. P. Anand gives a clue. Note that none of his peers, Jinnah, Motilal Nehru or even Gokhale dared to travel 3^rd class that time.

Indescribable filth: We do not know the elementary laws of cleanliness. We spit anywhere on the carriage floor, irrespective of the thought that it is often used as it; the result is indescribable filth in the compartment.

Getting roasted: Sometimes the compartments had no lights. From Saharanpur we were huddled into carriages for goods or cattle. These had no roofs, and what with the blazing midday sun overhead and the scorching iron floor beneath, we were all but roasted.

Ticket booking: (At Burdwan) As soon as the ticket window opened, I went to purchase the tickets. But it was no easy thing to get them. Might was right, and passengers who were forward and indifferent to others, coming one after another, continued to push me out. I was therefore about the last of the first crowd to get a ticket.

Getting shoved in from a window: My bitterest experience was from Lahore to Delhi. It was impossible to find a place in the train. It was full, and those who could get in did so by sheer force, often sneaking through windows if the doors were locked… I had almost given up when a porter discovering my plight said, “Give me twelve annas and I’ll get you a seat.” “Yes,” said I. The young man went from carriage to carriage entreating passengers but no one heeded him. As the train was about to start, some passengers said, “There is no room here, but you can shove him in if you like. He will have to stand…” I readily agreed and he shoved me in bodily through the window. Thus I got in and the porter earned his twelve annas.

Gandhi concludes, “Is it any wonder that plague has become endemic in India. Any other result is impossible where passengers always leave some dirt where they go and take more on leaving.”

I will be traveling III AC from Bangalore to Kolhapur by Rani Chennamma this weekend. I booked my tickets over the Internet. My compartment will be, in all likelihood, clean and it will be cleaned again at Hubli. Is there any chance of me understanding the plight of the man traveling in unreserved compartments? It is not surprising that Motilal Nehru couldn’t even understand the power of “salt march”. His telegram to Gandhi said, “What will lifting a pinch of salt do?”

Catalign Quarterly – September 2012

Catalign Quarterly is an attempt to put together insights relevant for fostering a culture of innovation in organizations – both for-profit and not-for-profit. Through articles and interviews we explore principles, practices and policies that help organizations become more innovative.

Theme for this quarterly is “Building experimentation capacity”. Why worry about building experimentation capacity? Well, how far can you fly with the wings of ideas? Experiments give shape and provide anchors to ideas. Most importantly they also tell us which aspect doesn’t work. For leaders, experimentation provides a better alternative in selecting ideas as opposed to Powerpoint or prejudices.

The main article is “4 levers of building experimentation capacity”. The 4 levers explored are: Right to experiment (RTE), laboratory, innovation sandbox and open innovation. Other articles explore each of these four themes. Mahatma Gandhi was a great experimenter. But how open was he in others experimenting? “Mahatma Gandhi and the Right to Experiment” explores this aspect. This article on Galileo's life explores how an instrument such as telescope can take the experimentation capacity to a new level. 

We may be carrying fixed set of ideas of what a lab might look like. Agastya Foundation shatters the concept by beautifully combining two metaphors: A school in a lab and a lab in a box. Wright brothers epitomized systematic experimentation. This article explores how they increased their experimentation capacity from 1 flight a day in 1900 to 100 flights a day in 1903. What happens when a lab turns into an innovation sandbox? This article based on the Pulitzer Prize winning book “The emperor of allmaladies” by Siddhartha Mukherjee narrates one such story in the journey of cancer research.

• 4 levers of building experimentation capacity
• Mahatma Gandhi and the Right to Experiment (RTE)
• Why does Galileo smile in spite of the telescope fiasco?
• Building experimentation capacity in rural schools in India: The Agastya way
• Two innovation sandboxes in Wright brothers’experimentation journey
• Two ideas that turned cancer research into a massive innovation sandbox

Theme for the next quarterly is going to be: "Design Thinking" - very much in line with my next open program (with the same title) to be held on Nov 7-8 in Bangalore.

photo sources: wikipedia.org & flipkart.com

4 levers of building experimentation capacity

If you want to promote a culture of innovation, you will need to build experimentation capacity. How do you do it? Well, here are 4 levers you might want to consider.

Right to experiment (RTE): If nobody in the organization has a permission to experiment, then there is no hope for any innovation. Right to experiment (RTE) is a foundation principle on which innovation capacity is built. Many times “RTE” is considered synonymous with Google’s 20% rule or 3M’s 15% rule. According to this rule, every employee can spend up to 15 or 20% of his time working on his own experiments.

I see 2 issues equating RTE with a policy such as Google 20%. One, RTE doesn’t have to be granted to everybody like in Google. It can very well be granted to only those whose idea is passed through a first level of screening or to those belonging to specific departments (or some other policy suitable to your culture). Second, putting a policy in place doesn’t guarantee RTE will be exercised in the organization. For example, Jaruhar, an innovator from Indian Railways, discovered for the first time that he has the permission to experiment when he became member (Engineering) of the Board. By then Jaruhar must have put in a couple of decades of experience in Indian Railways. That’s awfully long time for smart guys like Jaruhar to start experimenting.

You may be a great experimenter and yet as a leader you may not realize the importance of RTE. For example see how Mahatma Gandhi’s view on RTE evolved over the years. Ask yourself: Who has the right to experiment here? Who is actually experimenting? How are we encouraging it?

Laboratory: It is not enough to have the RTE. You need to create a space which gives legitimacy to experimentation & failure – just like a meditation room may give legitimacy to silence. Most of the time, the space is physical which also fosters collaborations. However, sometimes it can also be virtual – e.g. on the cloud. Thomas Edison said, “To invent, you need good imagination and a pile of junk.” A good laboratory makes the junk “useful”. In Ideo, the person looking after a laboratory is called curator. A good laboratory wears past failures with pride on its chest. When a laboratory is accessible to a lot of people, it can build a huge capacity. Perhaps that is why Galileo smiled in spite of his telescope fiasco. Sometimes a laboratory can also be mobile so that it can reach people who don’t have easy access to it. For example, see Agastya Foundation’s efforts in building experimentation capacity in rural schools. Ask yourself, have you created a space for experimentation? Does your lab have adequate tools?

Innovation sandbox: There may be several projects running in a laboratory. However, a time comes when experimentation needs to be focused on a single challenge. What you need is an innovation sandbox – It has focus, massive experimentation capacity and ultra-low cost for each additional experiment. Tata Nano came out of a sandbox. Similarly, Wright brothers created two sandboxes during their flight experiments during 1900-1903. See what happens when a pathology laboratory gets converted into an innovation sandboxfocused on cancer research. Ask yourself, have you built an innovation sandbox?

Open innovation: Procter & Gamble’s connect-and-develop program systematically goes about finding experimentation capacity within P&G’s partnership network. You don’t have to solve all problems internally. Organizations collaborate with academia, Government research labs and with other companies. You can also tap experimenters through open innovation platforms by throwing a challenge and inviting prototypes. To find more about how open innovation challenges work, see the interview of Jayesh Badani, CEO of Ideaken. Ask yourself, have you explored building experimentation capacity beyond your organization?

Open innovation: Ideaken CEO Jayesh Badani shares his experience

We got an opportunity to talk to Jayesh Badani, CEO of Ideaken, a Bangalore based start-up providing an open innovation platform. Jayesh was one of the panellists at Next Gear, a workshop on innovation leadership I facilitated in July. Ideaken platform is enabling MNCs and social sector solve some of the tough problems they are facing. During the discussion, we explored following questions on open innovation with Jayesh:

• What is open innovation?
• How do you formulate the right challenge?
• How do solvers protect their IP?
• Have you had customers who announce the challenge, learn from the submitted ideas and not select any?
• Does every challenge have to result in a prize?
• Do you help solvers in finding if there is a patent related to their idea?
• What is the value addition you (Ideaken) do in the whole open innovation process?

Here is a sample Q&A. For complete discussion, please see here.

Q: What is open innovation?

Jayesh: If you look at every innovation, it can be traced back to a simple question, “Can this be done better?” If you ask this question to yourself daily, actually you are innovating. If you ask the same question to your team, you may get better answers. If you ask the question to people sitting in this room, it may add further clarity.

Many companies are dealing with some fundamental problems they can’t solve. They have innovation teams working on these problems. Sometimes there is a mental block that innovation can only happen from within. Sometimes it goes even further when individual says, “It has to be from me, so that I get the credit.” This is changing slowly. A lot of people like C K Prahalad have talked about concepts like co-creation. Some companies have started doing it in a bigger way.

It begins with a challenge – the company wants to solve. Now, formulating a challenge is itself a big step. It is not about the details. Sometimes you can write 10 pages and yet nobody understands it. Depending upon the complexity and clarity associated with the problem, formulating a challenge may take a few days to a few months.

For example, we had this challenge from a food processing company. They have the packaging machines which go fast and pack your food. In this process, air also gets packaged in the packet. From the food point of view, less the air better the shelf life. But unlike items like pen or pencil, you can’t remove all the air from food – air is part of the food sometimes e.g. cake. So the challenge is how to remove maximum air without affecting the product in optimal time. You could slow down the process to do it better. But that affects you productivity – how many packets you can pack in a minute also matters. So in essence even if you can reduce the air by 5-10% then you are talking about a significant gain in product shelf life.

Once such a challenge is formulated and announced, it goes through a clarification phase from interested solves. Someone might say, “I don’t understand this aspect of the challenge.” Or “I think I can reduce the air only so much, is it ok?”  A challenge duration may wary from a month to 3 months. Outcome from short duration challenges are just ideas while some amount of detailed solutions are expected from a longer duration challenge. When we launched this specific challenge related to food packaging, we received solutions from 20 countries.